Happily Ever After

As a child, I loved folk and fairy tales. I love them still.

Every one has the promise of adventure. There's excitement in the hero's quest and satisfaction in the series of challenges presented and solved in ritual fashion. Dress it in an exotic setting, a far-off land or alternate time, and the tale engages my curiosity. Imagination embellishes familiar themes with the trappings of another culture. Build your story on a foundation of magic and spirituality, and you make it irresistible. The fabric on which a fairy tale is embroidered is a world in which things happen for a reason. Dangers may threaten, but good prevails and adventures are neatly tied up with all as it should be in the end. There's a wonderful mix of comfort and excitement in this type of story, and familiar ideas are allowed to mingle with the whisper of magic.

I read all the fairy tales, folk tales and mythology I could find when I was young. I read them over again as I grew and added the worlds they had inspired to my tour: places like Oz and Narnia. New versions and twists on the familiar tales came next, and I continued to consume whatever I could of the genre all the way into adulthood. It's no wonder I grew up to write fantasy stories. The elements are similar. Symbols and themes learned in a lifetime of fable serve well in that kind of storytelling. Fantasy, though more complex, tends to be the grown-up version of the fairy tale.

Even the classic stories are no longer limited to children's literature. Authors who love the legends of their youth have revisited them in novels for a mature crowd. Jane Yolen, Gregory Maguire, Robin McKinley, and many more have polished up the magic of these old friends and explored the layers of possibility in the legendary mold. I will never run out of reading material regardless of the target audience.

This tendency to seek out fairy tales and myths inevitably leads to comparisons. Read enough similarities in the tales, and you start to build a toolbox of symbols, characters and events that work on a primal level in your own storytelling. Instinctively, you develop a sense of connection to an older vocabulary that links us all. Unconsciously, you begin to decode other types of stories and recognize the building blocks underneath them. Read enough differences in the tales, and you learn where you can jump away from the expected and create your own path. You begin to catch glimpses of cultural mindsets, and you train your mind to look at things from a different angle. Exciting new possibilities emerge.

As you steep yourself in folktales and fables, you begin to realize that these stories represent the spirit and ideals of the people. There are lessons here and warnings and moral truths, all served up to willing young minds. Fairy tales speak volumes about what is important to a society, and all those ideas are carried into adulthood on a very deep level.

Chief among the principles at work is a belief in a "happily ever after." The tales tell us if one is good enough, clever enough, or patient enough, everything will work out for the best and they will be taken away to where they really belong and rewarded for their troubles. At its heart, the idea is a positive one: that good begets good. Still, it can be kind of a trap. It's easy to be discouraged if you haven't been given your happily ever after. It's easy to conclude that you just haven't suffered enough, or maybe that you're the wicked stepsister and don't really deserve the happy ending.

Now, my own preference always ran to stories with strong heroines who made their own destiny rather than waiting for rescue, and my fairy tale-loving daughter has embraced the same sort. Janet rescues her knight Tam Lin from the Faerie through bravery and perseverance. The little girl (whose name varies with the telling) escapes Baba Yaga through clever use of the magical gifts her kindness won her in the witch's house. But even in these stories where heroines have claimed their own happy ending, there is still that familiar concept. That's as it should be, because it seals the story and proves to hopeful minds that there can be some light lurking behind the dark days. The real danger comes from the way we apply the fairy tale ending to our own real world lives.

We can never really avoid the comparison. The yearning for the happily ever after is ingrained in us, both as part of our culture and as a basic human desire for happiness and comfort. I think the real problem comes from our definition of the term. Think of the circumstances attached to the endings of the most well-known fairy tales. Happily ever after usually involves justice, wealth, power, marriage, a castle and possibly children. Does this tell us that we can't be happy without these things or their modern equivalents? It would seem so. In a way, we are programmed to believe we are unhappy, unfinished, or unworthy without them. A classic fairy tale ending is not only unrealistic but completely unnecessary for you to live happily ever after.

I'm not suggesting that happiness comes from abandoning your dreams. It's not about settling for less, but about examining how you define your happiness. Maybe you'll find you're not that interested in being swept away and taken care of by a handsome prince. Maybe you'll discover that wealth means nothing for its own sake. Maybe your happily ever after includes new challenges to overcome and new riddles to solve. We don't have to blindly accept society's definition of success. Each of us has the right to decide our own measure, and each of us has the right to be happy with wherever we are in our own personal fairy tale.

My own life has been a winding quest through various challenges with at least as many setbacks as successes. But, when I reflect on what makes me truly happy, I have to conclude that the elements are all there. My life is not perfect. I haven't reached all of my dreams. I'm not without troubles or sorrow, and yet, I know that right now, I am living happily ever after.